


Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

by Dark_Ruby_Regalia



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Blind Ignis Scientia, Hand Jobs, M/M, Noctis Lives!, POV Alternating, Post-Episode Ignis Verse 2, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:08:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24127144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Ruby_Regalia/pseuds/Dark_Ruby_Regalia
Summary: Noctis has saved Eos and Ignis has saved Noctis. But what do they do now?Estranged and filled with conflicting needs, the two of them must find a way to leave the past behind and forge something new.
Relationships: Noctis Lucis Caelum/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 24
Kudos: 117
Collections: The Ignoct Indoor Gift Exchange





	Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saisei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saisei/gifts).



The earth was damp, clingy, fragrant, separating easily for the blade of the spade. It lifted in great dark mounds, satisfyingly stable as Noctis transferred each scoop into a barrow. In the back of his mind he was aware that a lot of the mass of it — especially here, within the crumbled walls that still snared the war-torn city — was the scourge that ruined the sky. He didn’t know of that time, beyond a brief window after waking, when he’d emerged into any long daemon-filled night only to learn it had been midday. Amongst all the other strangenesses, he didn’t dwell too long on this one. He’d been gone, and he’d missed much, and now he was back.

He did know of the weeks that followed — the dead scourge rain. The weather brought it down, huge storms of the stuff, each water droplet thick with it, dark as ink. It painted everything, and while the sky cleared to its brilliant blue, the earth turned black.

“Blue like your eyes,” Ignis had said, when Noctis had remarked on it once. But Ignis was comparing a memory to a memory. Some past blue sky, some past blue eyes. Noctis had felt his heart race at the purity of the sentiment; to realise his eyes were Ignis’ version of the heavens; that when he heard  _ sky _ , he thought only of Noctis’ blue. 

“Just like that,” Noctis answered, and he laughed with the lightness of his pulse to break the tension of his sorrow. 

He looked up to the sky now, clouded the luminous white of a bright overcast. Midday again, he figured. A recurring time for him. And perhaps uncannily, though not to Noctis, a clock tower began to chime for noon. These coincidences didn’t disturb him like they used to; he felt, in his bones, that he knew different things now.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” 

Noctis hadn’t heard Ignis approach. He’d stopped wondering how Ignis always knew it was him; he probably felt different things in his bones, too. “And you found me. As ever.”

Ignis smiled, his errant gaze as clouded as the skies above.  _ Who has sky eyes now, _ Noctis mused. 

“What are you doing out here?” Ignis asked, an uncharacteristic crease in his brow. Like everyone, he had harboured some expectations for Noctis’ return that Noctis was failing to live up to.

Noctis turned back to his spade, taking another purposeful scoop, bending his mind to it. “I’m clearing paths.” There was a defensive snap in his words he hadn’t intended. “Some buildings around here are still intact. We need them for housing.”

“You’re the King!”

“So everyone keeps saying.” Another scoop of earth.

“Your people need you!”

Noctis whirled around, the dirt falling at his feet. “They don’t though! They haven’t needed me for ten years, and they don’t need me now!” His voice rose as each word tumbled out unchecked.

“That’s not true, Noct.” Oh, the nickname through those lips. Noctis softened to it instantly with a sigh.

“No, it’s a good thing. I’m glad they don’t. Relieved, really…” He shuffled his toe in spilled earth. He was working his way along a narrow sidewalk between buildings — access for pipework and for power. What was more noble than this, he wondered? What did Ignis — what did  _ anyone _ — think he could do? “I’m not sure I ever wanted to be king.” It was a confession stoppered in a buried bottle, and now that the cork was out, it trickled weak into the air between them. “And besides, after everything, it’s not fair.”

By  _ everything _ he meant his absence. He’d returned to a people united by hardship, tough and bruised and surviving. It was a collective experience he would never share, and he felt himself on the outside of it daily.

“But you saved the world.” Matter of fact, just like that. Ignis always was good at facts.

Noctis laughed. “Pretty sure that was you, Iggy. I just fought a guy.” 

The silence that followed was warmed by that laugh. It was laden and expectant, but with what? Neither of them knew, though they ran up against this silence often. A fractured familiarity. Noctis tucked a lock of hair behind an ear and turned back to his spade, driving it into the dirt once more. The sound of it filled the silence with the slice and the lift, the clodded tumble, his laboured breathing under exertion. He was finally gaining condition again, feeling his muscles take over where before there was only his desperate determination, as though he had to prove he’d been worth saving by pushing past his limits. It felt good to have his body respond; for it to ache like a normal body aches, tired after a day of work, not ruined by waste and by blade.

His next drive was cut short with a clang as the spade struck something hard and the handle punched him in the chest. He expelled a grunt. 

“You alright, Noct?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He rifled through the dirt with the spade corner, uncovering a smooth glint. “Hit something is all.” He bent to work it free by hand, scraping away the rough from the smooth. “Oh, wow…” He gasped his disbelief, picking it up.

“What is it?”

“It’s… it’s a snow globe.” He brushed it off as he stood again, clearing the glass with the hem of his shirt, amazed it had survived intact. The dome was still full; the water clear. “You know that sundial in the Royal Parklands? Out by the South wall, with the statue of a spiracorn for a dial?”

“You mean the park we’d sneak out to on stolen nights, holding hands in the dark because nobody could see us?” It was a recollection so sacred and sentimental it caught them both off guard. 

“Yeah,” Noctis said, a lump forming in his throat. “Yeah, that one.” He walked to Ignis, stood close by, the globe cradled in his hands. “It’s that statue surrounded by winter trees. The flakes of snow are iridescent white. Here,” and he held it out for Ignis to take, to touch. 

Noctis watched as Ignis mapped it with his fingertips, travelling the juncture between glass and the heavy base, his hands soiling as he traced the delicate filigree, the gilded feet, and finally the underside. “The base is wooden,” he said eventually, “carved and inlaid. Amazing it hasn’t rotted away. And it’s a music box.” He gently upended the globe, the snow slowly sinking to the top of it, and he smoothed dirt from a hidden keyhole. When he explored like this he tilted his head slightly to one side, an affectation Noctis found himself mirroring as he split his attention between Ignis’ wondrous expression and the detail he was pointing out. 

“Amazing,” was Noctis’ inadequate response. He reached to trace the keyhole himself, and their fingers brushed, then lingered. 

“You always liked that statue best because it was an animal,” Ignis whispered.

“We walled all the real ones out. I was fascinated.” They were both smiling. “And besides, the rest were all stuffy royal busts, and I saw enough of those walking the corridors at home.”

Ignis chuckled. A wonderful sound. “They survived, you know. The spiracorn. A pocket of them, wandering the Cleigne highlands. They learnt to dig roots when the grasses ran out.”

“I’m glad,” Noctis whispered back. “I’m glad the mess made by gods and men didn’t destroy everything.” He ran his thumb over a scar on Ignis’ hand. “Only most things.” 

Ignis pulled the globe close to his chest, and Noctis with it. “We survived,” he said, his voice solid and insistent. “Because of you.” 

“And I survived because of you.”

Ignis brushed a hand against Noctis’ cheek, tracing the contours of it as he’d just traced the filigree. His expression of wonderment returned, this time laced with an unfathomable heaviness. “Come home for lunch?”

~

Noctis had been distant since his return and Ignis didn’t know how to bridge the gap. He’d spent a life making plans, and saving Noctis from the clutches of a gods-given fate had been but one of them. His greatest, surely, but still just a plan; the impossible was a concept Ignis felt no fear of testing. But he couldn’t have planned for  _ this _ . 

They shared quarters, by his arrangement, but beyond that — finally together — everything fell apart in Ignis’ hands. Noctis was silent, elusive and oversensitive, adjusting to a world changed beyond recognition in a body he said he barely recognised. Ignis had tried to imagine that body — Noctis, but older — and couldn’t quite make the image stick. He would be eternally twenty in Ignis’ mind, smooth and full and beautiful. The man he felt beneath his fingers now felt very different to that memory, and grafting the new information onto the old was more challenging than he was comfortable admitting to. But it was the familiarities that hurt the most — an inflection, his uneven footfall, the hours he kept. The silk of his hair. The mumbled “good morning” he gave as he stumbled from his room, whether it was morning or not. Those were  _ Noct _ — they were  _ his _ Noct — and he could feel him slipping away. 

“Let’s find the park,” Ncotis had said that morning through a yawn, slumping into a chair opposite Ignis at the bare dining table. Ignis had lifted with the suggestion, his heart set soaring — Noctis seldom requested anything, least of all company. 

Ignis had wrapped his hands tighter around his hot mug of coffee to hide their tremble, and he’d nodded. “Okay.”

Noctis walked beside him now, his step fast and strong. Ignis knew they’d fallen into stride by the single sound their soles made on the pavement. An intuitive coming together, just like it was back when— he shook off the past with an effort. “Do you remember the way after all this time?”

“Yeah. It’s not the same for me as it is for you. It could have been yesterday, or maybe tomorrow. I don’t know, it’s—” and he paused, and Ignis knew he’d waved his hand in the air to show his confusion— “strange.”

“I see.”

Noctis laughed. “You better than most.”

Ignis couldn’t help a broad smile. He relaxed his vigilance a little, raised his face skyward to catch the warmth of the sun and let the world guide him. More than the faint echoes of his movement, the counted steps, the compass of his own mind, he knew his place by the breath of his companion. He knew they were close, shoulder to shoulder; he knew Noctis was happy today by the brightness in his voice; he knew if he reached out he could take Noctis by the hand, if he dared. The urge was strong, but he tamped it down. He was afraid Noctis wouldn’t let him keep hold of it.

“Almost there?” he asked instead.

“Close.” A few steps of silence. “You’re not guessing, are you.”

“Not quite, no.”

“Was it the ring?”

Ignis’ steps faltered and he fell one step, then another behind. “What do you mean?” 

“That lets you sense the world.” They both came to a stop.

Ignis’ eyes flashed around unseeing, betraying his search for an elusive answer. “I think so, yes.” He paused, second-guessing his next confession. “You especially.”

Noctis was silent, yet not still. He shifted on his feet. Agitated? No, not this time; uncertain. Ignis held his breath, waiting for a response. 

“Come on,” Noctis finally said, leaning forward to twine their hands together. He squeezed and held tight. “The park is just around the corner, but somehow I think you already know that.”

Ignis smiled again, abashed. “I do.” Still, he let himself be led.

~

Noctis’ trepidation set in as they neared. The wrought iron fence that bounded the park was rusted and bent, destroyed entirely in places by fallen masonry, the spikes that capped each rail adding menace to the tortured masses of metal and stone. The entrance gate had been thrown off its hinges; it was propped bent and askew against the great stone fountain that once, long before, spouted a dazzling welcome to visitors. The force of impact had shattered each concentric dish, knocking the graceful herald from her crowning perch on the top tier. She lay half- buried in dirt and scourge behind, one delicate wing rising upward from her back. 

A sad “Oh” slipped from Noctis’ lips. 

“Not good, I take it?”

“I guess part of me hoped—”

“Part of all of us hopes. It’s how we survive.” They drew closer together, faltering to a halt. “We don’t have to continue, you know. We have our memories.”

“I want to keep going,” Noctis said. “I think I need to. I have no connection to any of  _ this, _ ” and by  _ this _ he meant the world destroyed, the city of ruin, the ten years everyone lived on without him. “The past can’t be all I have, you know?”

Ignis fell silent, subconsciously raising a hand to the base of his neck where he pressed at a pendant nestled there. A bead shaped like a skull, threaded onto a fine chain. Noctis knew it well, and his stomach clenched; he’d gifted the necklace when they were young. Too young, really, to be fooling around, rebellious and ecstatic and calling it love.

They set off again, slowly this time, part reverence and part hesitation. “It can’t be all we have, either,” Ignis said, his voice laden with emotion.

“I know,” Noctis whispered. “But we were so long ago.”

“It could have been yesterday, or maybe tomorrow,” Ignis repeated back, his voice fading to nothing. 

Noctis huffed his recognition. “Well, how about right now?” he said, his voice lifting with the question, a surge of fondness rousing an impulsive thought to action. As Ignis turned to him, Noctis stepped closer, right into his arms, and he stood on tiptoes to place a kiss on Ignis’ lips, light like a butterfly, and just as delicate.

They’d kissed before, once, when Noctis first returned, a muscle-memory compulsion sparked by relief, fuelled by fear. Then they challenged fate together, the trajectory of their entire lives hurling them toward one brief and cataclysmic inevitability… And they survived, and reality shifted, and they were left with nothing between them but a question shared by all of Eos: what next?

This time, the kiss was different. It was promise, it was pure, it was bright, it was new. A smile bloomed between their lips, and they gave in to the moment. To this  _ right now _ . Then Noctis brushed a finger across Ignis’ cheek, and the breeze caught the moisture on it — a tear, wiped away without a word spoken.

When they broke their chests were heaving with each breath, their hearts hammering with life.

“Let’s keep going,” Noctis said, stepping out from the heat of their embrace, tugging again at Ignis’ hand. 

The park itself was derelict, monotone and barren. Overhead the trees wove bare branches into a blackened web; if there was any tendril of life within them it remained long dormant. Underfoot, the paths were almost entirely obscured, a reclamation blown in by the wind to bury everything ten years deep. It was eerie to find an entire land abandoned like this; fled from, left behind. By the lack of footprints in the soil, he guessed the two of them were the first to return here. The skin on his neck prickled; a shiver took his spine. 

“Are you alright, Noct?”

“Does it feel spooky to you too?”

Ignis took some time to answer. “It was like this every day you were gone.”

_ Oh _ , Noctis though. “Oh,” he said aloud. The horror of it gripped him; a pang of understanding for how vast, how deep, how absolute that experience would have been. Even here, today, he had it easy; there was a sun, there was a sky. “I’m so sorry, Iggy. I can’t begin to imagine…” He tried nonetheless, but the effort left him sullen. His legs felt leaden to the bone.

“Hey,” Iggy said. “Don’t join me in that darkness.”

“I’m the only one who doesn’t know what it was like.”

“Then let us come to your light.”

They rounded a garden bed planted thick with skeletons, the bent and bony limbs of topiarised bushes not even decay had come to claim. They encircled a clearing, wide enough at the edges to clear the centre from the canopy, and there — rising majestically into the air, its spiral horn sharp as a needle — they found the spiracorn leaping over the sundial. 

“It’s still here,” Noctis breathed, vibrant with surprise. “It’s here, Iggy! It survived!”

“Even the horn?”

“Even the horn. Imagine that.” He led them to it, reaching a hand to its flank, the cold marble smooth beneath his palm. “Only imagine it painted completely black now.”

“Is there a shadow?”

“A good one.”

“What’s the time?”

Noctis followed the shadow that fell before the beast until he reached the tip of the horn. Right there he scraped dirt aside with his foot to clear the numerals below. “Midday,” he laughed. “Of course it is.”

“When the sun is highest in the sky.”

Distant, from the city, the clock tower chimed. 

~

Noctis was sitting at the table when Ignis woke at dawn. Ignis could hear him doing something, some kind of focused busy-work, a metallic tinkering and the dull clatter of things being picked up and put down on the wooden surface. 

“Were you up all night?” he asked, knowing the answer would be yes. Noctis, so comfortable in the darkest hours.

“Oh my gods, Iggy,” Noctis startled, dropping something that started to roll. He launched out of his chair to catch it before it fell to the floor, knocking the chair over in a raucous clatter, hissing a litany of expletives. Ignis waited patiently for the cacophony to subside. “Ah, I’m… yeah, all night I guess. What’s the time?”

“Six, or just after.” Noctis gave a horrified groan; this wasn’t an hour he experienced often. “Sounds like you need coffee. I’ll make two?” 

“Thanks, Iggy. I’ll… I’ll be back.” He cleared the table, disappearing first to his bedroom, then into the bathroom. The faucet ran a while, then shut off, and Noctis returned to the kitchen, to Ignis’ side. “Good morning.”

Ignis reached for him, a tentative touch, feeling water at his hairline and droplets caught in his bangs. Noctis lifted his head in Ignis’ hand, allowing Ignis to explore. This new face — with its strong jaw, hollow cheeks and a fine, whiskery beard the young Noctis could never grow — was fast becoming the new shape of his fondness. “Good morning,” Ignis replied. “I must confess, it’s nice to have you here this early.” 

To his surprise, Noctis leaned into him, close enough that errant droplets fell from his hair to soak through the fabric of Ignis’ shirt. “Didn’t mean to be. Couldn’t sleep, lost track of time.”

“What were you doing?”

“Hmm?” 

“At the table.”

Noctis giggled and buried his face in Ignis’ chest. “You don’t miss a thing, do you? It’s nothing, really. Just fiddling around.”

Beside them, the kettle began to sputter the first plume of steam through its whistle. Neither of them moved. This affection was new and fragile, an elusive thread that brought Noctis to him just as unexpectedly as it would draw him away. Ignis held his breath in moments like this, afraid to move lest he break the filament. But the kettle was insistent, its whistle stabilising and escalating, the roiling water setting it rocking on its warped base, reminding Ignis that everything was salvage, picked out of rubble and put back to use. Perhaps this relationship — if it was that — was no exception. 

“Turn it off?” Noctis asked, his words whispered against Ignis’ neck. There was a softness to him this morning — tiredness, no doubt — but there was something else there too; a frisson that set Ignis’ skin alight. 

He reached to shut the flames out. Instantly the kettle simmered down, the whistle fading to nothing. He brought his arms back to Noctis, daring to hold him, to pull him tight into an embrace. “Are you alright?” he asked, wishing concern wasn’t his first response to intimacy.

“Yeah,” Noctis whispered. He mouthed it against Ignis’ skin. “I’m good.” He pressed a kiss to Ignis’ collarbone. “I missed you.”

Ignis had waited so long to hear those words. “I missed you too,” he whispered back, burying his face in Noctis’ hair. “So much, Noct.” They found their way to each other’s lips.

This kiss was a hungry thing; a kiss buried by ten years of darkness, finally resurfacing. They were equal, they were unafraid; they were healing a deep absence. Noctis led, the first to slip his hands beneath Ignis’ clothes; the first to roam planes of unknown skin; the first to press their hips together, to make himself undeniable, the hardness of him hot against Ignis’ groin. The first to get his teeth involved, nipping at the scar on Ignis’ lip, then at his neck. 

“Touch me,” he said; not a plea, not a demand. A premonition.

Ignis stuttered a breath; moaned his desire. “As you wish,” he managed, and skimmed along flanks, following the curves of Noctis’ strengthening body, the arcs of new muscle, the dips that showed he was still far too lean. Beneath his waistband then, heat-seeking; his first touch of coarse hair.  _ Please _ , Noctis was whispering in his ear.  _ Please, Iggy _ . And Ignis took him in his hand, desperate for the weight of him, the proof of want; and Noctis dug nails into his shoulders, forgot his kisses, trembled against him as he pressed into Ignis’ fist. And oh, he was sweet, he was so beautiful and so divine; he whimpered and cried out and called Ignis’ name, and he remembered his kisses again, pressing erratic fluttered pleasantries against Ignis’ moist lips, quietly keening, his hands tangling in Ignis’ hair. 

He pulsed his spend silently, his face turned skyward in rapture, his grip on Ignis’ shoulders sure to bruise. __

“Thank you,” Ignis whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. And Noctis laughed. 

“You have this all backwards,” he said, quiet and amused. “That was  _ my _ orgasm. Unless I get to thank you for yours?” And he dropped to his knees at Ignis’ feet.

~

Afterwards there was coffee and breakfast and a shower, and Noctis found himself witness to an Ignis acting bashful, losing himself in recollections of the morning, colour rising to his cheeks. It was a treat Noctis savoured silently. Ignis’ surprise had been as lovely as his acceptance; he never expected pleasure in return, and of course he’d never make the request. He had given Noctis more space than was reasonable to ask for; a distance respected, if not understood.

How could Noctis explain it, though? His body was foreign to himself; his mind strange and altered. He’d spent ten years with a god inside his head… Some days he still felt echoes of it in there… 

The clock tower striking midday had Ignis scrambling out the door. “I lost time,” he apologised, “I had no idea.” Despite his haste, he lingered on the threshold, unsure how to say this particular goodbye. He dashed back in for one last kiss and a promise he’d return soon; bold, for him, and welcomed by both. Maybe distraction was good sometimes; it kept him tethered to the moment. Ignis, a man of the past and the future, to whom the present was merely a time to check maps to see what would happen next.

Alone, Noctis returned to his room, gathering the pieces of the dismantled snow globe he’d hastily hidden away. He laid them carefully on the table again, piece by piece — an order he’d memorised when he’d taken it apart — and he settled down to continue scraping and cleaning, polishing springs and gears, removing the dirt lodged deep into every crevasse, stubborn though it was to give up its hold. It was a simple mechanism, frozen over time, moisture locking up all its joints with a patina of stubborn rust. But the spring was still a perfect spiral, curled taut and responsive, ready to be wound; the cylinder polished back to its metallic gleam, each note of the song preserved proud on its surface; the comb was straight and strong, each tine awaiting a pin to set it singing. He longed to hear it. First he had to bring it back to life. All he needed was a key…

~

Ignis returned home to an empty house. He’d come to expect the opposite in recent weeks — everything had been finding its place, both out in the chaos of the city and within these four tight walls, and in too short a time he’d grown accustomed to new patterns, one of which was finding Noctis there. Not waiting; just  _ present _ . He scolded himself for his expectations; it was unfair to think Noctis could be held down. Each day they woke in separate beds; they left the house at different times. While Ignis made his way to the city centre to create order out of bureaucracy, Noctis still insisted on picking up tools, taking to the streets to give his manual labour. Most people didn’t know who he was; just a stranger who preferred to keep to himself, shovelling and shifting what had fallen to uncover what withstood. He was none of them, yet one of them — his back bent the same way; sweat glistened on his brow. 

Ignis heard stories, though, about the recovery team and  _ that man who lives with Ignis Scientia. The handsome one _ , they’d say;  _ the mysterious one, with eyes as blue as the sky _ . He first to help and last to put his toolbox down; he was kind, he was peaceful. They liked being near him.  _ That’s your king _ , Ignis desperately wanted to tell them.  _ That man with eyes as blue as the sky would have died to save you all _ . Instead he held his silence and let his heart fill. 

The house felt incredibly empty without him. 

Ignis made a hot drink, then sat at the table, telling himself he wasn’t waiting, that this was merely passing time. And when footsteps shuffled up to the door and a key was fumbled at the lock, he told himself it wasn’t a sigh he gave; it was just another breath like any other. 

Noctis came in slowly, tripping over Ignis’ shoes. 

“What’s wrong?” Ignis asked, jumping to his feet, reaching out to find him. Noctis gave a start, and then he laughed. 

“Power’s out to the whole quadrant; it’s pitch black in here.”

“Oh,” Ignis sighed again. He’d allow himself this one; relief, and an appreciation for the irony. “I have candles,” he said. “Let me find them.” And he crossed the room to rummage through a drawer. 

“You have candles?” Noctis asked, bumping into the table as he fumbled his way forward. “Why do  _ you _ have candles!?” 

Ignis chuckled to find the irony going both ways. “Ration packs,” he explained. “One candle in each.” He returned to Noctis, pressing the wax pillar into his hands. “I had little use for them.” Amusement laced every word. “I’ll fetch matches.”

“No need,” Noctis said, and the  _ way _ he said it gave Ignis pause as he stepped away. He turned back just as a flash of brilliance filled his mind.  _ Light _ , and  _ Noctis _ , the form and the feel of him; brilliant and vivid and shocking to his senses. 

He cried out, and he reeled backward and brought his hands to his eyes, covering them with an instinct he’d had no use for in a decade. For but a second he’d no longer been the only figure in the room — there Noctis stood, those few feet from him, tangible and magnificent. When the afterimage faded and the sound of his own blood pumping no longer rushed deafening in his ears, he uncovered his eyes to the comfort of his customary blackness. A few blinks and the moment was gone. He could smell warming paraffin; hear the crackle of flame on wick. The candle was lit.

“Are you okay?” Noctis said, the gentlest voice Ignis had ever heard in him. They were both dropped to the floor, Noctis in pursuit of Ignis, and Noctis stroked him, smoothing hair from his temple and over his ear, achingly tender. “I’m so sorry, Iggy.”

“Magic?”

“Only enough for parlour tricks.”

“I didn’t know…”

“I didn’t either, for a while.”

“It felt… like I could see you.” He wanted to cry. “I’d forgotten what light looked like. I forgot—” his voice cracked— “You were  _ right there _ , Noct…”

“I still am, Iggy. I’m right here…” But his soothing touch withdrew, and Noctis rose on his knees, rifling through his pockets before settling back down. “I have a gift.” He moulded Ignis’ hand into an upturned cup, then dropped something heavy into it and curled Ignis’ fingers over the top. “Collected it tonight.”

Ignis puzzled over it, turning it in his fingers. Small and metallic; a shaft and a circle; some detailing purely for ornament… Filigree on a stem and bow. “A key?”

“Yeah. Wait here,” And Noctis left him on the floor while he disappeared into his room, returning again to sit back down, setting something carefully between them. ‘For you.”

It was the snow globe, cleaned and restored. Ignis could tell the glass was bright and the wooden base polished; knew the feet would be gleaming and the flecks of snow would settle golden in the candlelight. He lifted it gingerly, turning it over in his lap, running his hands over it anew. “Where did you find a key that fits?”

“I’m a king! I get to make impossible demands.” Noctis laughed at his joke, then sighed. “My kingdom for a key, and all of that nonsense.”

“You know I don’t believe in  _ impossible _ , Noct.” He located the keyhole.

Noctis leaned into him. “I found the clockmaker. The one who fixed the clock in the tower. He was amazing and wonderful and made me cups of tea while he took a mould of the lock. He sculpted a little wax key for it, then cast it for me. For you, really. Leftover bronze from mending clock tower bells.”

Ignis’ lip trembled. “And the globe? He fixed that too?”

“No, I did that. I hope… We’re about to find out, I suppose.” He rest his head on Ignis’ shoulder, watching, waiting. 

Ignis slid the key into the hole, then made to turn it. The resistance took immediately, and he pushed into it, the ratchet within clicking as he spun, holding the potential in place. “Ready?” he asked, and Noctis nodded against him. He withdrew the key, and as he placed the globe back on the ground, the first notes of its song came spilling out, along with Noctis’ gasp of excitement.

They listened in silence for a while, following the tune, each note pulled crystal-clear from a tine plucked by a pin on the cylinder within, and the two of them hunched over the top of it as though it was a coal and they needed the warmth. 

“I know this one,” Noctis said, as the tune came round to the start and kept going. “How do I know it?”

Ignis hummed along for a while. “It’s one of the solstice songs,” he eventually said. “Remember the midsummer festivals? We’d dress down so nobody recognised us, then stay out too late listening to the folk bands that set up on street corners downtown.” 

“Normal people doing normal things. I longed for it. Still do, I guess.” The spring ran out, and the song slowed to a halt. Noctis rewound it, and the conversation waited for the song to resume. “Dad thought we were going to those stuffy black tie balls.”

“It’s the only reason he let us out. He thought we were chaperoned.”

“Well, with you there, I was, only not in the way he expected.”

Ignis giggled — actually giggled, surprising them both. “You mean stealing his son for a night in the streets, licking ice cream off his fingers and kissing him in dark doorways—”

“Iggy!”

“What?!” He affected a false outrage. “Tell me you weren’t remembering the same!” He wrapped an arm around Noctis’ shoulders and kissed the top of his head.

“The sun took forever to set and the city took forever to cool down. We’d get back to my apartment, late and hot, then f—” 

“No,” Ignis interrupted. “No, you are not about to say what I think you are.”

“—Fuck on the floor beneath the ceiling fan.”

“You make it sound so vulgar.” They were both laughing.

“It kind of was.”

“You weren’t. You were more beautiful than anyone I’d ever seen.”

“You still are more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen.” The spring ran out a second time and the silence constricted around them. 

“So are you,” Ignis said, a strangeness in his timbre. “If what just happened counts as  _ seeing _ .”

“Gods, Iggy, I didn’t know it’d be so… weird.”

“Which part, exactly, of all of  _ this— _ ” and by  _ this _ he meant absolutely everything— “are you referring to as ‘weird’?”

“Where do we even begin…” They laced their fingers together, both of them at once, seeking equally and finding. 

“Noct—” But Ignis hesitated, summoning a courage he hoped he hadn’t lost. “Would you like to share my bed tonight?”

“Of course,” Noctis answered, just like that. As though all Ignis had to do this whole time… was ask.

~

It was far too early when Noctis woke, his sleep disturbed by the persistent nudge of a tepid sunrise. He blinked his eyes against the light, taking stock of his strange surroundings. Different walls, different sheets, the wrong side of the bed. The windows were completely bare; he blamed their immodesty for his consciousness. 

He lifted his head gingerly, propped himself on an elbow and let his eyes roam where they dared. The blankets were thrown off during the night — the heat of two bodies more than ample — and Ignis was bared from the waist up, the expanse of him smooth and perfect between ribbon-like scars that twisted and curled across his skin, matching those that took his sight away. He was relaxed into his pillow, eyes closed and features soft, a glint of tooth showing between parted lips. Just another man who needed sleep. Yet he was also the man whose will defied the gods; who’d bargained with them, stared them down, plotted against them to turn the tides of fate. Brilliant, fierce, frightening, beautiful. And he’d done it all for Noctis. It was a love Noctis felt incapable of; feared he couldn’t match. 

“Are you watching me sleep?” Ignis asked, a smile curling the corner of his lip. 

“I thought I was.” 

He reached out to play with Igins’ necklace. The bead had slipped to the back of his neck, and Noctis fished for it between body and bedding, sliding the little black skull to the front and nestling it between Ignis’ collarbones. He used to do this back then, too, on those hot summer nights, when they’d wake up stiff on the floor at dawn, giddy for having gotten away with it all. 

“I never stopped loving you either,” Noctis said, pulling the filigree key up to rest alongside the skull. They came together in their shared hollow with a singular, satisfying clink.  _ One for you then and one for you now, _ Ignis had explained, when he’d unhooked the necklace to thread the key on. “I just didn’t know whether you were still you, or whether I was still me.”

Ignis stilled Noctis’ hand at his throat, wrapping it up in his long fingers. He clutched it tight against his chest. “There’s no rush, you know. We have time.” 

_ Time. _ That was true, now, but was difficult to acknowledge. The near-misses were still so painfully recent, and if he dwelled on them long — which he often did — a despair took hold, borrowed from some different outcome he knew so easily could have come true. He blinked away a well of tears, hoping to keep them hidden. But he had no such luck; Ignis was too well attuned. He pulled Noctis into an embrace. 

He listened to Ignis’ heart beat steady against his ear; closed his eyes and let himself succumb to yet another habit pulled through from the past. All those mornings after, when every day tore them apart — set them up as puppets in a shadow play — they lay like this until their alarm went off. Red numbers glowing in the dark, counting down their freedom. Noctis remembered despair then, too; maybe he was prone to it. 

He turned his head to lay kisses across Ignis’ chest, an unhurried trail of them, sleepy and aimless and steeped with gratitude. “We need to get you some curtains.” Beneath him, Ignis chuckled.

They stayed in bed until midday.

**Author's Note:**

> My heartfelt thanks to every single one of you who gives time to my words. My heroes ❤


End file.
